Life Its Ownself (32 page)

Matilda had been partly to blame for her own demise. She had insisted that Marvin senior turn the wrong way up a one-way street. Rather than argue about it, Marvin senior had taken the turn, and their car had collided head on with a drunken priest in a Chevrolet. Marvin senior had only suffered a broken arm.

Four months after Matilda died, Marvin senior had married Holly McFaddin, a woman who kept books for him at Tiller Electric. Two years later, after all of us were in TCU, Shake's dad sold the business and made enough on the sale to retire in modest comfort.

Marvin senior and Holly, a woman Shake had always liked, bought a home in Ponte Vedra, Florida, and they were living there today. Shake would visit them on occasion and stay until he was overgolfed by their conversation.

Shake could now look back on his youth, at the home in which he was raised, with humor. His most vivid memory of Matilda was the time she had unleashed a weeklong reign of terror followed by another week of smoldering silence because of a careless remark his dad had made.

One evening at the dinner table, Marvin senior had said, "My momma used to cook with lard. That's why everything tasted so good."

On our way to Boakum, we were passing through another peaceful-looking, tree-lined town when Shake said, "Looks pretty, doesn't it? You know what's going on behind these closed doors?"

"Rage?"

"Fucking right. I guess I'll never understand why it's necessary."

"It's a people deal," I explained.

Shake confessed that for the first time in his life he had been feeling a little lonely, even when he was being held hostage by a shapely adorable, but it hadn't made him want to get married.

The only thing it had done was make him want to start on a novel again. He might hire a thirty-year-old Swedish housekeeper who could double as a masseuse.

"To live in?"

"If she looks like Kathy Montgomery and doesn't speak English," he said.

I wondered how the language barrier was going to solve the loneliness problem.

"I don't want her for a friend," he said. "My friends will be the characters in my book."

By appointment, we met Tonsillitis Johnson and Mutt Turnbull, his coach, at K's Restaurant in downtown Boakum.

Downtown Boakum was a courthouse surrounded by four blocks of deserted storefronts with head-in parking for the only other vehicles we could see, which were four pickup trucks and a Datsun 280Z. Tonsillitis' car, courtesy of Big Ed.

K's Restaurant looked like a place I had spent half my life in. It was a rural Herb's Cafe.

Leatherette stools along a serving counter. Linoleum-top tables. Tile floor. A black-and-white TV on a shelf playing a
Gunsmoke
re-run. A blue-and-orange Boakum Bobcats pennant on the wall above a squad picture of last year's Class AA state champions, the Boakum Bobcats. Antique brass cash register. George Jones on the jukebox. Meatloaf special on the menu. Tired K cooking in the kitchen and tired Marvene behind the counter. And two fence-menders trying to beat the pinball machine.

"Finesse that fucker, Dace!" said one of the fence-menders as the machine clanged and flickered.

Tonsillitis and Mutt were seated at a table in the rear of the place. We sat down with them as Marvene brought us coffee we hadn't asked for and put another cup of tea in front of Tonsillitis.

Tonsillitis was wearing a Levi jacket over a T-shirt and his yellow reflective glasses.

Mutt Turnbull was exactly what I had expected to find. He was a squat little guy in his forties who was getting bald, the kind of man of whom his friends would say: "Mutt, you ain't gettin' any smarter, you're just gettin' wider."

"I reckon you boys is the biggest names what's ever been in here," Mutt said. "You don't care if Marvene takes some Polaroids, do you?"

Marvene came to the table with the Polaroid camera.

"We're flattered," I said. "Will we be on K's wall?"

"Honey, y'all are the Red Cross!" Marvene said. She snapped the pictures and brought us a slice of homemade chocolate pie.

"Sorry about the Eula game," Shake said to Mutt.

"Broke my heart is all it did," the Boakum coach said. "We'd have gone all the way again, but I hadn't ought to complain. Tonsillitis has give me more to brag about than anything else I'll have in this life."

I asked Tonsillitis if he felt the same about football— was he still confused?

"Haba say to probe for the inner truth," he said.

"You can probe in college and still play football," Shake said.

"College be havin' material value. Haba say material value is the road to evil."

Mutt Turnbull said, "You ain't gonna get nowhere with him. The swami's got him up to his ass in clean air, clean water, pure food, and pure spirit."

"Is that all you want?" I said to Tonsillitis.

"Haba say it's the way to inner peace."

Shake said, "Tonsillitis, would you play football again if Haba said it was all right?"

"Haba don't like football."

"Haba might change his mind."

"Who gonna change Haba?"

"Grover."

"Grover who?"

"Grover's the boss swami."

"I never heard of Grover."

"Haba has."

Tonsillitis said he would follow Haba's teachings, even if they led to playing football again.

That was all we needed to know.

"Where can we find Haba?" I asked.

Tonsillitis said Swami Muktamananda was waiting for us across the street in the square. The swami refused to patronize K's because the restaurant served carbonated sodas.

We left Tonsillitis and Mutt in K's and walked over to the square, where we found Swami Muktamananda sitting cross-legged under a hackberry tree.

The swami was a black man in a beard and dark glasses. He was wrapped in a bedsheet, wore a baseball cap that said "BLUE SOX" and a pair of high-top tennis shoes. There was no other swami in the square. It had to be him.

Shake and I plopped down on the grass with him, introduced ourselves.

"You are men of sweetness, I have a way of knowing," said Haba.

I came right to the point.

"Haba," I said, "we've got a gentleman in Fort Worth who's reached his E.O.R."

"I do not understand," said the swami.

"End of rope," I said. "The gentleman wants Tonsillitis to play football for TCU so bad, he's willing to increase his contribution to your cause."

"I have no cause, I only have my teachings."

"My man thinks your lectures would be greatly improved if you had five hundred thousand dollars in the bank."

"Oh, my," said Haba.

I said, "The man's name is Ed Bookman. He's extremely wealthy and a man of God. Although he's a Christian, he respects your beliefs. He says he's convinced you will have many more visions come to you out of the pitch blackness if a half a million is deposited in your account at the United Bank of Austin."

Shake said, "I've lived a cloistered life myself, Haba, and I've learned something about bucolic. He don't pay the lights, gas, and water."

"You have spoken a truth," Haba said.

I said, "Mr. Bookman says he will make half of the contribution now and the other half when your disciple signs his letter of intent on Feb. 8. This is assuming we have a deal."

Swami Muktamananda saw the need to meditate for a moment, to ask his divinity for guidance in the matter. He tilted his head back, put his palms together.

Coming out of it, he said, "These funds would be tax- free?"

We drove back to Fort Worth on the interstate. I put the Lincoln on cruise control, stuck an Elroy Blunt tape in the cassette deck.

We were a few miles outside of Boakum before I asked Shake the question of the hour:

"Do you think Big Ed knows Darnell is the swami?"

Shake said, "I don't think Big Ed cares as long as he gets Tonsillitis wearin' that purple."

Kathy looked prettier than I had ever seen her. She sat across from me at dinner on Friday night of that week. I was introducing her to good Tex-Mex food at Casa Dominguez, a restaurant and sports salon near downtown Dallas where my picture hung on the wall in a gallery of other desperadoes.

"It's interesting," Kathy said of the corn tortillas that were stuffed with orange cheese and chopped onion and covered with a delicate brown chili gravy.

"You can't get this in New York," I said. "In New York, you get swill—cottage cheese inside pita bread with tomato sauce on top, or something worse. There's a place in Midtown that claims to serve chicken-fried steak. I asked a waiter one night if the gravy was any good. 'It's wonderful' he said. 'We make it with mushrooms and sherry.' He should have had his tongue cut out. The chef should have had his hands cut off."

"Is this chicken-fried steak?"

"No, it's enchiladas. Tex-Mex. Chicken-fried steak is something else. Chicken-fried steak is just...food."

"I like steak and I like chicken," Kathy said. "I'm not sure I'd like them together."

She misunderstood, I said. A chicken-fried steak was a cheap piece of beef that had been tenderized—had the shit beat out of it. Then it was cooked in a batter like fried chicken. "You pour cream gravy over it."

"Gravy made with cream?"

"If it's done right, it looks like scrapbook paste, but it tastes better. The chicken-fried steak was invented in 1911 in Lamesa, Texas, by a man named Jimmy Don Perkins. He was cooking in a cafe and got his orders mixed up. They can talk about Davy Crockett all they want to. Jimmy Don Perkins is my hero."

"Is that what they teach in school down here?"

"They should," I said. "I wish a guy from Fort Worth had invented the chicken-fried steak, but all we can claim are the ice cream drumstick and the washateria."

Kathy looked at me with concern.

"Historical facts," I said. "God bless I. C. Parker and J. F. Cantrell. In 1931,1. C. Parker was working for Pangburn's Ice Cream Company. He accidentally dropped an ice cream cone covered with peanuts into a pot of liquid chocolate. The world took it from there. The saga of the washateria goes back to 1934. All J. F. Cantrell was trying to do was survive the Depression. His cleaning business was going broke. He put in four washing machines, let people do their own, and called it a washateria. The place is near where I grew up. It's a landmark."

"I could have gone my whole life without knowing these things," Kathy said.

"I come from a pretty famous high school," I said. "You know who went to Paschal? Ginger Rogers. Ben Hogan, the golfer. Alan Bean. We had the third man on the moon. Who went to your high school?"

"Ona Schulenberg."

"Who's that?"

"She was the first woman to walk three thousand miles backwards. I had her for English grammar."

Kathy had arrived from New York that afternoon. She had checked into a room on the same hall as Shake and I at the Adolphus in Dallas. We had moved to another suite that was 35 miles east.

Years ago, the Adolphus had been one of the swell hotels in Texas, like the Menger in San Antonio and the Driskill in Austin. It had a nightclub with an ice rink and a restaurant where Bonnie and Clyde used to go to dinner. It was in the heart of downtown Dallas, only a block or so from the original Neiman-Marcus. The Adolphus had fallen into a period of despair but it had been remodeled and furnished with fine antiques and it was a swell place again. Its elegance recalled a better time in our lives than the modern glitter of America's suburban hotels.

Before going to dinner that night, I had spoken to Barbara Jane in California. I had filled her in on the Tonsillitis- Darnell-T.J.-Big Ed drama. She had screamed with laughter at her daddy buying a fake swami.

"That's half a million out of your inheritance," I had reminded her.

"The joke's worth it," she had said.

Considering all the millions Big Ed had left, she may have been right.

Barbara Jane had confirmed the fact that she was going to have the weekend free. She had been tempted to fly down to Dallas.

I had talked her out of it. She wasn't going to miss anything but a lousy football game and dinner with Teddy, Mike, and Ken, I'd said.

"Ken?"

"My stage manager."

"That's right. You still like him?"

"He's okay," I'd said.

Kathy and I had invited Shake to come to dinner with us at Casa Dominguez, but he had other plans. His plans had included a tour of the bars out by SMU and the hope of finding a Tri-Delt of loose morals who had been stood up by a Kappa Sig.

Kathy was into her third frozen Margarita at dinner when I said, "Did you know the Margarita was invented in El Paso, Texas, in 1942?"

"Stop it," she said.

"It's true. The bartender's name was Pancho Morales. He was looking for a way to tame the tequila one night... to keep his customers from breaking so much furniture. That's when he came up with the idea of adding Triple Sec and lime juice."